Somehow, while clicking away at the Internet, I managed to get to this blog post, which is a rebuttal of this article by Cory Doctrow about cloud computing. Please keep in mind I dislike most of the things that come off of Cory’s fingers intensely, and even elements of the aforementioned article. Where I blew an artery was at the rebutter saying:
Cloud computing fosters intense competition.
This is not just wrong (people are wrong all the time, and I don’t blog about it), it’s dangerously wrong. Nowhere in technology have we had less competition potential, and more monopoly potential than in the realm of cloud computing. Why? Cloud computing is all about size and marketing. I remember back in the day when I was happily using WebCrawler to scour the Intertubes for what I wanted to find, when some jerks from Stanford started some crappy search engine called Google. Pffft. “There’s tons of competition in the search engine market”, the analysts said. I was concerned then, I’m concerned now.
Any centralized Internet service is about size and marketing. Read up on my last post if you want to know how I feel about centralized services in general. Right now there are three major players in the “cloud computing” market. That will grow, as did search engines, to probably 20 major players and everyone will think I’m nuts, and then they will be slammed against the wall by One.
One that claims not to be evil.
One that believes (truly) they’re doing good.
One that rules them all.
This is not some psychic prediction, this is the recognition of a pattern that has played out too many times in the young life of the commercial Internet.
It really depends on what you’re looking at, I suppose. I use Zoho instead of Google for a lot of things (which isn’t in your 3, I believe) and a host of other small services that aren’t large by any means but fit what I need perfectly (Basecamp, Zoho, Dropbox, the list goes on). It’s also worth nothing that most the services I do *pay* for are from these smaller outfits (excepting Flickr).
Thanks for the link! 🙂
Yup, there are all sorts of little quazi-cloud services out there, just like you still could go use Webcrawler if you wanted to.. but the results would be inferior and you’d wish you were using Google the whole time. Cloud services will be that way “soon”. Google might not be the top dog of that, but there will be Only One that matters.